Chris's Blog Archive: August 2016

August seemed to go past in a blur. This had a lot to do with the
fact that I found myself a new, awesome job. Spare time was no longer
in such abundant supply, but I still managed to keep on target for my
songwriting endeavours.

In the same month that I found myself blogging about weird observations
of a star 1480 light years away which (perhaps) hint that there's an
advanced extraterrestrial civilization out there busily surrounding
their star with solar panels, I find out that SETI researchers have
recorded a strong
candidate signal
from somewhere a lot closer to home: a star just 95 light years away.
HD 164595 is older than our Sun, and almost identical to our own star.
We know it has at least one planet - something the size of Neptune -
so it's already an interesting-sounding system. The timing of the
signal is very interesting too, as it would have been sent when they
were seeing our planet as it was in 1826 - by which time the western world's
Industrial
Revolution was drawing to a close and its effects on the makeup of
Earth's atmosphere - a distinctly unambiguous indicator of intelligent
life here - would have become visible to a sufficiently large telescope.

Nobody's saying right now if the signal had content, but it
will be discussed at a meeting of the IAA SETI Permanent Committee,
which is scheduled to take place during the 67th International
Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on September 27th.
I'll be paying very close attention to that.

THANKS FOR THAT

I use Statcounter to track visits to the website so I can see the
occasional manic peaks when, for example, William Gibson retweets
one of my blog entries and the rate of site visits spikes by two
orders of magnitude. Last week I got an email from them telling
me that the relevant code on my site "was broken" and they were no
longer able to track visits.

When I took a moment or two to sit down and see what was going on,
it became that my code wasn't broken; Statcounter have changed their
code to fold in a secure communications layer - apparently intended
to support the Shopify e-commerce platform, which I don't use, and
I can't imagine a reason why I would use it right now. Clearly this
is not the same as my existing code being broken and I was more than a
little peeved by having to change the code in well over two hundred
web pages as a result - particularly when I discovered that I had to
it by hand, as the find/replace routines across multiple files on
NetBeans and Notepad plus plus do not play well with code.

I'm managing to stay on track for Fifty/Ninety,
more or less; as of Thursday afternoon, I've written and recorded twenty six
pieces of music and uploaded them to the site's servers.

My working method is gravitating more and more towards Ableton Live.
I used to record most instruments against a click track on the Korg
32-track recorder and then zap them across to the DAW, but I'm now
playing directly in to Live. The ability to specify punch in and
punch out points to an insanely detailed degree within Live
means that I can polish individual instrument tracks far more, and
that's given me the confidence to attempt more challenging musical
arrangements. I can hear the improvement, too - even over what I
was doing back in February for FAWM.

My singing has also improved. I've moved away from double- or even
quadruple-tracked vocals and gone for single vocal takes. The NT1-A
mic means I can hear far more detail when I'm recording, so I've been
able to add more expression into my voice. And despite having a copy
of Celemony's "auto-tune" software Melodyne to play with, I haven't
used it at all so far (which really surprised me).

I'll be back recording more stuff this afternoon.

WHERE HAS THE MONTH GONE?

The last couple of weeks have flown by. I'm really enjoying my new job,
and the work is taking me into new areas of learning and development
that are fascinating. Since you asked, my official role is
Learning and Development Consultant with
Profitability Learning & Development Services,
based in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

As you'll see from the website, the company develops business simulations.
It's a bit like designing a playground and populating it with toys that
people can interact with, then engineering situations where they discover
things as a result. Needless to say this appeals a lot to my creative
side. This week alone I've been an instructional designer, programmer,
video editor, composer and voiceover artist. I'm having a whale of a time.

WHERE HAVE THE YEARS GONE?

I just got a card from my bank thanking me for being a customer for
twenty five years. A nice touch, but - blimey. Has it really been
that long?

Back in January I blogged about how the weirdness level of
Tabby's Star, also
known as KIC 8462852, had been
dialled back considerably after a
closer look at the historical data suggested that the star's progressive
dimming was an artefact of the change in processes used to measure
luminosity over time, not changes in the star's luminosity itself.

But now the weirdness has ramped back up again after
Ben Montet of CalTech and
Josh Simon of
the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington uploaded a
paper to the Arxiv
server which describes their analysis of the data for the star from the
most recent source - the Kepler space telescope. Their conclusion is that
the star really is dimming, and that over a period of
200 days during the observations, KIC 8462852 dimmed by a whopping
two percent.

Stars don't do this.

The authors of the paper politely suggest that the "cloud of comets" theory
proposed to explain the star's behaviour

&QUOT;does not naturally account for the long-term dimming
in the light curve observed in (the) data, suggesting that this idea is,
at best, incomplete.&QUOT;

As Montet told the website Gizmodo, he and Simon spent some time trying
to convince each other that what they were seeing in the data
wasn't real
but weren't able to. It's an extraordinary phenomenon.

The story reminds me once again of an event that a character refers to
in Vernor Vinge's novel Across Realtime.
The character has arrived in the distant future after being thrown into
stasis shortly before humanity experienced a Technological Singularity.
She describes how mankind's engineering capacity had grown to the point
where one unexplained project
dimmed the Sun by five percent.

Are we seeing this happen out there for real?

BROWSE ON

I'm really digging the Vivaldi
Browser at the moment. Vivaldi is a fork of the Opera browser
(which was recently bought
by a consortium of Chinese companies) which has retained many of the
useful features that the original program subsequently dropped.

You can really fiddle with options in Vivaldi. The Settings page is
fantastic - much better than the other browsers I've used. It's worth
giving it a go if you're fed up with Firefox's bloat or Microsoft's
browser breaking things.

ENJOYING MYSELF

The new job is fun. I don't think I've found myself laughing so much at
work for at least a decade...

LAGGING

...but work has meant that I am behind the curve on Fifty/Ninety at the
moment. I'm going to head into the studio now and try to catch up.